Okay, I never saw that. This article was posted yesterday so I thought it was new.

The interview is new in the sense that it has just been published in the magazine. So it's perfectly fine for discussion here, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew when it was conducted (as big things have happened since).

Hey guys, just to clarify I conducted that interview and that's my feature in SFX so I can confirm that interview was conducted the first week of Nov. It's not months old. It's pertinent to the production as of episode seven and to post shut down issues.

So to paraphrase: Joss is saying that Fox wouldn't let him make the show he wanted to and he has managed to create a compromise he can live with. Half a Jossvision is better than no Jossvision at all, I guess.

Joss: So this, the pilot I've just shown you, is the show I want to make. It tells a tale about a woman searching for what's real, reconnecting to her true self, and doing so against an onslaught of sinister, dark forces she's barely aware of. It's a tapestry of pain, of courage, of self discovery, ofÖ

Fox: (a twenty-something MBA) Duuuuude, it needs more car chases. Can it be about car chases? Oh, and wrestling! The Sci-Fi channel added wrestling to their lineup, so we gotta have that, too.

If the Fox guys were really that immature, they'd just stare at Eliza the entire time and say, "Sure man, whatever," to whatever Joss proposed... actually, that sounds pretty good for us.

As I read the article, Joss wanted to dive right in to the big questions and the tough episodes, and Fox was saying, "Hang on, man, you can't start doing that kind of thing until people actually want to watch the show." Imagine "The Wish" or "The Body" in Season 1 of Buffy -- it just wouldn't work! He needs to set the stage and hook people in... he needs his "Prophecy Girl" first, to keep the metaphor rolling.

Re: page 1 (aka the whole article): Nice bit of added insight from Joss. I hope we get to see his vision pan out. And get that second season. I really want to see him start dealing with the deeper stories, you know, the ones we were only STARTING to get on Firefly before they pulled that plug. (Not that I'm still bitter after all these years).

In his interview with Jeffrey Berman's The Write Environment series, Joss makes it pretty clear that he understands and appreciates the studio system (notwithstanding the strike issues and going indy with Dr. Horrible) -- by which I understood him to mean the creative process of the studio system.

Whatever any of us might think of how this has played out, positive or negative, I've taken to seeing much of what he says about Dollhouse's process in that light and context.

Part of me (warning: speculation) wonders, and has since the first changes started to be made, if he's been away from network TV for just enough years to have partially forgotten just how the studio system creative process worked. (Especially with his recent quotes about making rookie mistakes.) That would not be entirely unsurprising, a need to re-acclimate oneself to the television process after an absence.

I think "woo doggie" signifies an escape, a clsoe call, whereas "well doggies" signifies a pleasant surprise. I can see perhaps a cousin of Tara's using either expression especially, the latter,a long with "tarnation" and "land sakes" and "bastich" and "boy howdy," but not "yah, you betcha."